5 ms·

Like a lot of Arduino products, it must be targeted at people who don't know any better and whose sole exposure to electrical engineering or systems engineering

Like a lot of Arduino products, it must be targeted at people who don't know any better and whose sole exposure to electrical engineering or systems engineering is what they see in make videos. Automation direct PLCs are cheaper than whatever they're hawking here and almost certainly way more robust (having used a few, they were surprisingly good). Anyone who is using PLCs in a remotely serious industrial fashion is almost certainly going to keep buying Rockwell or Siemens anyways.

LtWorf 2y ago
> Automation direct PLCs are cheaper Uh... no.
- MisterTea 2y ago
  Click is competitively priced with the Opta and programming software is free.
erik_seaberg 2y ago
There may be competing products, but you can't go to a screwdriver shop today and buy quantity=1 to learn from, which vendors should have accommodated even at some substantial margin.
- folmar 2y ago
  Any large supplier will hapilly sell you one PLC of any type (there are also quite a lot projects needing just one piece of specific PLU), the tools might kill your budget though. And there are special beginner/low scale series like Siemens LOGO with simplified configuration and cheaper simpler tooling.
  - erik_seaberg 2y ago
    https://mall.industry.siemens.com/mall/en/WW/Catalog/Products/5000562 https://mall.industry.siemens.com/mall/en/WW/Catalog/Product... seems like a difficult vendor, with no buy button and no price tag.
    - seabird 2y ago
      Call your closest electrical supply and get the price. Plant maintenance technicians are comparatively old-timey, so ask yourself how you would do it in 1990 and try that. And for the record, brand new Logos are like $100-$200 on the low end and you probably shouldn't use them. The low end of S7-1200 will come in between $500-$1000 and is much more likely to fulfill your needs.
      - doobiedowner 2y ago
        Sure, call. Do a back and forth with calls and emails for two days with their sales guy to make sure they got it right. Spending five to six figures. 5-15% of order shows up incorrect. When you go to try another distributor: No, you're in crappy vendor's territory. So, sorry! Waiting for that invisible hand of the free market to step in...
        DannyBee 2y ago
        As i just posted, in this case, all you have to do is paste the part numbe rinto octopart and you would discover there are 5 no-questions-asked distributors that will sell you it without any issue. Standard ones, like distrelec, mouser, TME, etc. This is not hard
        seabird 2y ago
        I guess I'm fortunate enough to have never had any issues with the local yokels and haven't run into anybody with any distributor horror stories. Save Keyence, of course, but at least their salespeople are so desperate for sales that the salesman you have at any given time will usually let you walk all over them. AB's licensing entitlement processes have always given me more grief than distributors. If it's any slight consolation, there are at least a few places in the world that don't have too bad.
        airbreather 2y ago
        Use the Siemens configuration tool, it verifies your selections and then gives you a BOM to order from. You seem to speaking from the place of someone who actually hasn't done this before.
MisterTea 2y ago
> Like a lot of Arduino products, it must be targeted at people who don't know any better and whose sole exposure to electrical engineering or systems engineering is what they see in make videos. Industrial automation is exactly this. If you look up the history of the PLC, Dick Morley, founder of Modicon, specifically designed it to hide the computer part. The reasons were twofold: partly for marketing as in ye olde days computers were big, expensive and required costly engineers, and to enable plant electricians and other maintenance personnel the ability to program them using ladder schematics which is why we have ladder logic. So from the beginning the PLC has been targeted at non-technical personnel. > Automation direct PLCs are cheaper than whatever they're hawking here and almost certainly way more robust (having used a few, they were surprisingly good). Indeed, though I only like the Click. I have two Clicks at home and used them at work for all sorts of little projects. I haven't bothered with their Productivity line as I dont think it's a very forward thinking platform as its stuck in the 90's with parallel busses on backplanes with proprietary expansion (literally a clone of their Koyo DL series). Then there is their legacy Direct Logic series from Koyo which is solid as hell but long in the tooth. Now they are selling LS Electric which makes me feel they are all over the place PLC wise. For bigger automation projects I use Beckhoff gear which is very modular and their EtherCAT protocol is very well designed and thought out - deterministic structs over Ethernet. My only gripe is the big shitty Visual studio shell IDE that tends to fall over but every automation vendor has big shitty IDE's. Thankfully they have a FreeBSD runtime alternative to Windows Embedded for the controller side. I can write real-time PLC programs in C/C++ and whatever on the Windows/BSD side. Or stick with IEC 61131-3 languages. > Anyone who is using PLCs in a remotely serious industrial fashion is almost certainly going to keep buying Rockwell or Siemens anyways. That is more of an industry trope: "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" but replace IBM with AB for the USA or Siemens in Europe. Basically, Enterprise grade automation with all the associated enterprise goodness: high cost, licensing, price gouging legacy support, and poor technical decisions. I stay away from it.
- fluorinerocket 2y ago
  Beckhoff is so awesome. I bought at least 100 of their EP series modules, which are IP65 and can be mounted anywhere and use M12 and M8 connectors, so with the right sensors you can just connect with an off the shelf cable, no wiring connectors. No running endless sensor and actuator cables back to a central cabinet. And you get fast deterministic control with etherCAT no problem. Don't sleep on beckhoff
nick__m 2y ago
I second your opinion on Automation Direct PLC. I use a few of them in an installation for a museum 15 years ago and they had a surprisingly good reliability/feature/price ratio.
- doobiedowner 2y ago
  Cheap and reliable goods. Free software. Great prices. Decent Docs. Best of all, no middle men distributors to dick around with. It is so easy to buy their stuff compared to almost all other controls hardware.
airbreather 2y ago
Maybe, Beckhoff are cheap, got a good programming environment and programming software is free, plus their simulator is so good you don't need hardware until commissioning. In Australia you can buy them at Blackwoods (Plumbing and general supplies with over 60 stores) who hold good stocking levels. And there are others, Omron, Mitsubishi, Wago etc. Allen Bradley is unreasonably expensive below a certain scale that isn't small and Siemens is not much better - you can easily blow 20k on just a single CPU module, and TIA Portal on a preconfigured laptop is 20k. Rockwell (for AB programming) has changed to subscription model, but last time I had to buy Studio 5000 is was 10k for ladder and another 10k for the other languages. Plus a PLC won't run of a battery for a month, or a year, but a microprocessor will, it is all about your use case.

LtWorf 2y ago

> Automation direct PLCs are cheaper Uh... no.

MisterTea 2y ago
Click is competitively priced with the Opta and programming software is free.

erik_seaberg 2y ago

There may be competing products, but you can't go to a screwdriver shop today and buy quantity=1 to learn from, which vendors should have accommodated even at some substantial margin.

folmar 2y ago
Any large supplier will hapilly sell you one PLC of any type (there are also quite a lot projects needing just one piece of specific PLU), the tools might kill your budget though. And there are special beginner/low scale series like Siemens LOGO with simplified configuration and cheaper simpler tooling.
- erik_seaberg 2y ago
  https://mall.industry.siemens.com/mall/en/WW/Catalog/Products/5000562 https://mall.industry.siemens.com/mall/en/WW/Catalog/Product... seems like a difficult vendor, with no buy button and no price tag.
  - seabird 2y ago
    Call your closest electrical supply and get the price. Plant maintenance technicians are comparatively old-timey, so ask yourself how you would do it in 1990 and try that. And for the record, brand new Logos are like $100-$200 on the low end and you probably shouldn't use them. The low end of S7-1200 will come in between $500-$1000 and is much more likely to fulfill your needs.
    - doobiedowner 2y ago
      Sure, call. Do a back and forth with calls and emails for two days with their sales guy to make sure they got it right. Spending five to six figures. 5-15% of order shows up incorrect. When you go to try another distributor: No, you're in crappy vendor's territory. So, sorry! Waiting for that invisible hand of the free market to step in...
      - DannyBee 2y ago
        As i just posted, in this case, all you have to do is paste the part numbe rinto octopart and you would discover there are 5 no-questions-asked distributors that will sell you it without any issue. Standard ones, like distrelec, mouser, TME, etc. This is not hard
      - seabird 2y ago
        I guess I'm fortunate enough to have never had any issues with the local yokels and haven't run into anybody with any distributor horror stories. Save Keyence, of course, but at least their salespeople are so desperate for sales that the salesman you have at any given time will usually let you walk all over them. AB's licensing entitlement processes have always given me more grief than distributors. If it's any slight consolation, there are at least a few places in the world that don't have too bad.
      - airbreather 2y ago
        Use the Siemens configuration tool, it verifies your selections and then gives you a BOM to order from. You seem to speaking from the place of someone who actually hasn't done this before.

MisterTea 2y ago

> Like a lot of Arduino products, it must be targeted at people who don't know any better and whose sole exposure to electrical engineering or systems engineering is what they see in make videos. Industrial automation is exactly this. If you look up the history of the PLC, Dick Morley, founder of Modicon, specifically designed it to hide the computer part. The reasons were twofold: partly for marketing as in ye olde days computers were big, expensive and required costly engineers, and to enable plant electricians and other maintenance personnel the ability to program them using ladder schematics which is why we have ladder logic. So from the beginning the PLC has been targeted at non-technical personnel. > Automation direct PLCs are cheaper than whatever they're hawking here and almost certainly way more robust (having used a few, they were surprisingly good). Indeed, though I only like the Click. I have two Clicks at home and used them at work for all sorts of little projects. I haven't bothered with their Productivity line as I dont think it's a very forward thinking platform as its stuck in the 90's with parallel busses on backplanes with proprietary expansion (literally a clone of their Koyo DL series). Then there is their legacy Direct Logic series from Koyo which is solid as hell but long in the tooth. Now they are selling LS Electric which makes me feel they are all over the place PLC wise. For bigger automation projects I use Beckhoff gear which is very modular and their EtherCAT protocol is very well designed and thought out - deterministic structs over Ethernet. My only gripe is the big shitty Visual studio shell IDE that tends to fall over but every automation vendor has big shitty IDE's. Thankfully they have a FreeBSD runtime alternative to Windows Embedded for the controller side. I can write real-time PLC programs in C/C++ and whatever on the Windows/BSD side. Or stick with IEC 61131-3 languages. > Anyone who is using PLCs in a remotely serious industrial fashion is almost certainly going to keep buying Rockwell or Siemens anyways. That is more of an industry trope: "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" but replace IBM with AB for the USA or Siemens in Europe. Basically, Enterprise grade automation with all the associated enterprise goodness: high cost, licensing, price gouging legacy support, and poor technical decisions. I stay away from it.

fluorinerocket 2y ago
Beckhoff is so awesome. I bought at least 100 of their EP series modules, which are IP65 and can be mounted anywhere and use M12 and M8 connectors, so with the right sensors you can just connect with an off the shelf cable, no wiring connectors. No running endless sensor and actuator cables back to a central cabinet. And you get fast deterministic control with etherCAT no problem. Don't sleep on beckhoff

nick__m 2y ago

I second your opinion on Automation Direct PLC. I use a few of them in an installation for a museum 15 years ago and they had a surprisingly good reliability/feature/price ratio.

doobiedowner 2y ago
Cheap and reliable goods. Free software. Great prices. Decent Docs. Best of all, no middle men distributors to dick around with. It is so easy to buy their stuff compared to almost all other controls hardware.

airbreather 2y ago

Maybe, Beckhoff are cheap, got a good programming environment and programming software is free, plus their simulator is so good you don't need hardware until commissioning. In Australia you can buy them at Blackwoods (Plumbing and general supplies with over 60 stores) who hold good stocking levels. And there are others, Omron, Mitsubishi, Wago etc. Allen Bradley is unreasonably expensive below a certain scale that isn't small and Siemens is not much better - you can easily blow 20k on just a single CPU module, and TIA Portal on a preconfigured laptop is 20k. Rockwell (for AB programming) has changed to subscription model, but last time I had to buy Studio 5000 is was 10k for ladder and another 10k for the other languages. Plus a PLC won't run of a battery for a month, or a year, but a microprocessor will, it is all about your use case.